Women Connect Mobile App
Pair up female mentees with professional mentors from the industry
The Solution
Providing personalized guidance for job search, career growth, and informed decision-making to help females pivot in career and life.
The Challenges
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Finding the target user.
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Figuring out what problems we were solving and what solutions we could take under the time constraints.
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Working with a team whom I just met and knew nothing about.
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Tight timeline - Within 24 hours.
The Goals
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How to solve the tech lack of diversity problem by understanding females’ inspiration and pain points.
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How to create a solution that is easy to access for career-switching women.
Sign-up flow
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Understand users better and meet their goals faster.
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Comforting and welcoming visual elements.
Matching with mentors
Matching scores based on users' answers.
Scheduling or messaging mentors on the go.
Distill & Define
All three of the statements given were related to how to help underrepresented groups, especially women break into tech. After analyzing all the statements, we realized the bigger problem that women are facing in tech is that they don’t know where to find help.
Analyzed The Statements
The Baseline
Instead of solving one of the problems, we decided to solve the common problem for three: How to find mentors that build on trust.
Competitor Analysis
No community support
Many mentor program don't have online community for job seekers
Expensive paid program
Career coaching programs are expensive and difficult to form long-term relationships.
User Interview
Due to the time given, we couldn't spare time to find target users to conduct interviews;
However, four minority women from different countries can't be more perfect for this topic. From our personal experiences backed up with research, we learned that our path was a struggle not only for us. Changing careers is so difficult without help from others. Learning from people who had a similar experience will empower all women for fast growth.
I heard us saying...
User Personas: Mentee & Mentor (upcoming)
I Sarah represents a free Tandem app user who wants to meet friends worldwide. The step helped me define the kind of users my feature would be targeting.
User Journey Map
By creating a user journey map, we understood users' frustrations and needs better.
Prioritize Tasks
For our hackathon, we want to make sure we have a flow that is complete and comprehensive, so we focused on the mentee flows since our target users are females looking for career switching.
Design for "How might we help female job seekers find mentors easier?
Swipe? Feed? or Questionnaire? Crazy 8s method to brainstorm. And making decisions based on our persona and findings.
Wireframes, Make Ideas Easy To See
After two hours of discussion about what was needed and not needed, we decided to create wireframes then quickly test what's working and what's not. Wireframes helped us quickly understand where information is missing in a flow and gave us a better understanding of the feature and structure.
UI Kit and Design System
To make my future steps more accessible, I created a UI kit and designed a system to document all components and elements. One thing I've learned during this design process is always to keep files organized so that no matter who needs to use my file, they are easily navigate through.
The Most Valuable Things
We found the silver lining of working together in all steps and building on each other's ideas! The workflow of the application is easy and intuitive. The design is clear and esthetically pleasing, and functional! The Completion of a functional design in a limited time was exciting!
In addition, we won First Place in the Girls In Tech SF 2021 Hackathon.
Design For Good!
Our diverse team of four amazing females with superpower 🦄
At Girls In Tech SF 2021 Hackathon.
Have Fun 💃
The most important thing is that we had a lot of fun!
Future Roadmap
Final Thoughts
Testing and further research
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Conduct usability testing to understand if the app really solves women’s problems and meets their expectations. Interviews and surveys
Book/Schedule an appointment with mentor functionality
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Having a calendar to allow meeting scheduling Feature to reschedule the existing booking Reminders and Notification feature for upcoming bookings
Making the application accessible
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Adding light and dark themes and color schemes to provide more accessibility for all Support navigation through keys and usage of screen readers
Mentor Portal and a separate interface
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Separate mentor from mentee portal and customize features; Collaboration with corporations to promote diversity in the workforce; Create a platform for employers to add job and internship opportunities.
Things I would do differently...
Our biggest challenge was to optimize and prioritize a variety of ideas and tasks. I would make sure to make an Information Architecture early on so the team could work more structurally.
I would include engineers in the team to make sure we make trade-offs with backup data.
I would learn more about team members more, not only professionally but personally. Being more empathetic and caring. Every work is work with human beings.
The hackathon was an amazing opportunity to learn a lot in a limited time. I learned:
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Collaboration and working in a team with diverse backgrounds
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Respecting and encouraging all types of ideas
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Understanding each other's best skills
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Using new tools There are many ideas we thought were cool.
Due to time constraints and other factors, we had to make tradeoffs. Get feedback and implement it ASAP. We had great opportunities to get connected with other mentors and teams but not direct users.
Overview
Empowering women to transition into tech by connecting them with female mentors who share similar backgrounds. A "most visual" look at the design journey.
Background
Women Connect was born when I signed up for the Girls In Tech SF 2021 Hackathon with three females in November 2021. We were given a theme: Diversity and three statements for the event. We decided to solve one of the fundamental problems in the tech industry.
🏆 First place at GITSF2021 hackathon
Outcomes
Design lead
Role
Nov 2021 (2 days)
Duration
💡Conceptual
Status
UX/UI, facilitation, research, prototype, testing
Contribution
iOS mobile
Platform
Information software